The strategy was clear from the outset.
You could see it after Trump had been inaugurated and had settled down in his chair to do the work set out for him by his masters. He had to get through the signing of his executive orders, or rather, the executive orders that had been planned for him.
Don’t think that Trump had anything to do with them, or indeed that he knew anything about them. That was made clear by the presence of an aide, who stood next to the desk at which Trump was sitting. He announced the topic of the executive order in the same way that guests are announced at large, formal affairs. Trump nodded at each proclamation, penned his jagged signature on the document, and said a generic comment like, “oh, this is a big one,” at every turn. In the space of an hour, Trump had signed orders to end birthright citizenship, declare a national energy emergency, drop out of the World Health Organization, jettison the Paris Climate Agreement, establish two sexes (male and females, in case you’re wondering), free the insurrectionists of January 6th, put a pause on the Tik-Tok ban, rescind 78 executive orders sign by Joe Biden, declared another national emergency (this time at the border), and renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”
All but the last are hugely consequential. Any of them—barring that name change—would have been a defining moment in a normal presidency. Meetings would have been held, discussions would have taken place, debate would have swirled. A strategy and perhaps a counter-strategy would have been developed. Plans would have been made, and the announcement perfectly timed (they hoped) for maximal benefit and minimal risk. They would have been prepared for the howls from the opposition which could be expected.
There were grown-ups around Donald Trump, the first time around. They did the best they could, and perversely, they did an enormous amount. I loathe John Bolton, but I don’t think he’s a fool. Nor is Bill Barr, or General Milley, or Rex Tillerson.
They restrained him, perhaps, by giving him one big toy to play with. He could impose the travel ban on seven or ten Muslim countries, for example. We all went to the airport, and lawyers were volunteering to represent illegally detained immigrants. We all knew, we thought, what we were doing.
The masters hadn’t yet taken hold, back in 2017. Trump hadn’t declined enough, mentally, for him to become the easy mark for the ideologues like Steve Bannon and Steve Miller. The bonds holding the religious bigots, the totalitarian right, and the kleptocrats hadn’t had time to cement. Trump may or may not have ever had convictions, but he could adhere to positions. He was still trying—however feebly—to play the game in those first years.
Now, all the bets are off, and two things matter to Trump: revenge and money. Trump’s handlers have moved in and are preparing the executive orders. They feed Trump his daily hates—transgendered youths, sanctuary cities, elite universities. They no longer fear the courts—why should they? The Supreme Court told Trump to get ONE immigrant (Kilmar Abrego Garcia) back from El Salvador. That was April 10—six weeks ago. Nothing has been done, and nothing will be done.
Fascism has come to America, and all the brown-shirts had to do was flood the zone. The horrific has become routine, almost boring. Canada, for example, used to be on perfectly good terms with us, and now look what’s happened! They had to haul poor King Charles in, to murmur politely about but never address directly the elephant in the room. The elephant being the guy with the three shades of face paint and the slicked-back orange hair.
It isn’t death by a thousand cuts but rather a thousand slashes. And the effect is just what they desired: we (or rather, I) have become numb. It’s exactly like living with an active drunk—always primed for the worst, and secretly hoping and praying to yourself: “just bring it on—get it over with—I can’t stand living with this a moment longer.”
Even worse might be if Trump is taken down, but for the wrong reasons. The tariffs haven’t hit yet but soon will. Sixty percent of the stuff Walmart sells is made in China, and there’s no way that either Walmart or its suppliers could absorb a 30% tariff. The only thing to do is to raise prices, which is no problem for Trump’s billionaires, who can give him lots of money but only one vote. But most of the people who voted for Trump are shopping, today, at Walmart. I know, because I shop there myself.
So he could go because of the high prices, but in theory he could also go because of the corruption. The first term was child’s play—Trump was shaking down foreign dignitaries at his hotel down the road from the White House. True—the “dignitaries” were more than happy with the arrangement, and all Trump had to do was lap up the profits. But it could be argued that….well, where were they supposed to stay? At the Motel 6 off the Beltway?
There’s no pretense whatsoever this time around. Trump’s entry into cryptocurrency is a prime example: he announced his coin on January 17 and Melania joined in two days later. So now $Trump and $Melania have raised millions if not billions a scheme that is variously described as “pull the rug,” or “pump and dump.” Just to stir the pot (and stick it in the eye of us liberals), Trump gave a dinner a week or so ago to the top 220 investors of his coin. The price, if not the value, of $Trump jumped 50% in the day following the announcement (how often do you get to buy your way into the White House?) No one was surprised that following the dinner, Trump pardoned one of the guests—a reality TV show host and his wife, who had been convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion. Trump felt perfectly OK doing so, since he had gotten away with pardoning another criminal, a guy named Paul Walzack. Walzack had committed Medicare fraud by stealing over 10 million dollars from the paychecks of the doctors and nurses who worked for him. Fortunately, his mother kicked in a million dollars to attend a dinner in April at the White House.
It's appalling, it’s Trump.
So?
So what are we going to do about him?
My only answer is…whatever we can. As an American citizen living in Puerto Rico, I can’t vote for president. I also don’t have a senator or a member of the House of Representatives to represent me. But I can speak English—now the language of our oppressors—and so I call or write letters. And I can read, which is a civic duty.
Duty!
What a lovely old word, like “obligation” and “prudence / temperance / forbearance” and even “charity.” These Victorian concepts which seem as dusty as your grandmother’s antimacassar (the lace doily put over the backs of chairs to keep the hair grease from the upholstery) are strangely reassuring.
It’s a duty now, perhaps, to go back and read an author who I read at just the right moment in my life. And Sinclair Lewis certainly qualifies, since no one ever accused Lewis of holding back, of being overly-deferential.
He was a drunk, like me, and he died a drunk, though it was officially cardiac arrest that got him. And like a lot of drunks (and like me), he generally didn’t have a good word to say about anybody. He pissed people off, professionally.
I read him first when I was in Norway, spending six weeks on my parents’ boat in the Norwegian fjords. I was in my early teens, a time when any normal person feels disenfranchised and terminally unique. But it was also the mid-1960’s, when society itself felt unmoored. Richard Nixon was getting drunk and talking to the oil portraits of Lincoln and Stonewall Jackson hanging in the White House. Richard Daley was siccing the police on antiwar protestors in Chicago. Everybody was living in sin and smoking dope.
There is some music you should really hear first in adolescence—Tchaikovsky comes immediately to mind. But there are some books that you can only read, seemingly, in adolescence—and here, Ayn Rand is at the head of the pack. Sinclair Lewis qualifies as well, and it doesn’t hurt that Lewis is a guy who goes after the big themes. He doesn’t paint miniatures with a single-hair brush that he dips gently in pallid colors. Lewis is out there painting billboards next to the highway—or rather, he’s splashing neon colors all over the billboard, and some of the highway as well.
He has themes, he wrestles with them, they succumb and fall. Main Street is about small town life, Babbit is about boosterism, Arrowsmith about an idealist doctor, and Elmer Gantry is about religious hypocrisy. People hated him or reviled him, but there were also some heavy-hitting defenders. Mencken came out and said, “If there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds.”
He pissed people off, perhaps, but he also won praise. Not only did he win the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith in 1926, but he also won the Nobel Prize four years later in 1930. He was the first American to win the Nobel, and may have been the first to refuse to accept the Pulitzer Prize.
Why say no to the Pulitzer?
Lewis’s response tells you everything about what may be a very principled but perhaps prickly guy. He said no to the Pulitzer because it was to be given to “the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.”
Right—that’s an ouch.
In case you need more explanation, he goes on to say, in the very next sentence: “This phrase, if it means anything whatever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.”
So he left the award (and the 1000 bucks) on the Pulitzers’ table. He did collect, however, the Nobel prize, which brings with it a green-gold medal, a diploma, and (currently) some eleven million Swedish Krona, which is over one million USD. Even to have walked away from a thousand dollars was something, in 1926. To have walked away from a million at the start of the depression.
Winning the Nobel can be the heavy hand that strangles a career. Lewis had to get through another couple of decades before his death at age 65 in 1951. He was well known in literary circles, and was invited to give a course in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He loved the town, apparently, until he didn’t (he left after only giving five classes, and having taught everything, he said, that he knew).
He returned to Minnesota, spent time in Massachusetts, and died in Rome in 1951.
Almost 75 years later, Lewis occupies a certain place in American Literature. Maybe William Schirer said it best:
It has become rather commonplace for so-called literary critics to write off Sinclair Lewis as a novelist. Compared to ... Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner ... Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life ... was greater than all of the other four writers together.
It’s a curious thing, how often books that have the greatest impact on their times come not from the top drawer but steaming directly off the author’s desk. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is another example—Lincoln didn’t cite Stowe’s literary prowess, but rather called her (according to legend) “the little lady that has started this great war.”
Nothing Lewis wrote had the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but he may have been the first to see what the United States increasingly appears to be. No one was less surprised than Lewis when the plans for a movie based on the book fell through. He wrote this in The New York Times:
The preparation of the film script was turned over to the well-known playwright, Mr. Sidney Howard, who prepared a script which I thought was admirable. Most of the casting was already completed. Lionel Barrymore had been engaged to play the leading rôle of Doremus Jessup. Sets had been finished and shooting was to begin Monday.
Unusually, the producers of the movie came clean: they told Lewis’s agent that the movie was shelved permanently “in fear of international policies and the threat of boycott abroad.”
“I wrote It Can’t Happen Here,” Lewis said, “but I begin to think it certainly can.”
I begin to think it actually has.
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